I went looking for a photo print* I wanted to scan for use here on the site when I came upon the proofs for my senior college yearbook photo. They’re wallet sized, but my flatbed scanner made a large scan out of one tout suite.
I loved my long hair. It was a pain in the neck to take care of, because I had to style it with a blow dryer and a round brush to remove a broad and irregular wave that sent my hair in weird directions. But it was soft and full and I felt like a rock god. It helped introverted, timid me attract women, too. Many times women (at least those roughly my age) would just walk up to me and run their hands through it. I dated one of those women for two years!
My hair was a little out of control that day, with lots of flyaways. I normally worked to get a smooth look, but this day I must either not have had the time, or my hair just stubbornly refused to behave.
If I could go back in time I’d tell that 21-year-old kid to let the hair grow over the ears so it didn’t look quite so much like a mullet. I wonder how much more of a rock god I would have been had I let it grow long everywhere.
Here’s the image I went into my print archive to find. This is about a year later, after I’d graduated and found work and an apartment. I cut my hair months before because it was 100% getting in the way of me landing a job. It was a bummer, but one does what one must.
I’ve used an older scan of this image as the featured image on my weekly Recommended Reading posts. You see it only when you visit the site’s main page. But that version included a lot of unnecessary context from the room, so I rescanned the print at high resolution and cropped it tight.
This image came from a good weekend. My longtime friend Kathy came to town to visit and we had a great time together. She documented the entire weekend with her point-and-shoot camera and sent me a set of prints. This is a favorite because it shows me easy like a Sunday morning.
* It’s interesting that I have to pointedly write “print” in 2026. In 1988-89, when these photos were made, to say “photo” meant print.
To get Down the Road in your inbox or reader six days a week, click here to subscribe!